


Lover and Scholar

by Island_of_Reil



Category: The Lost Prince - Frances Hodgson Burnett
Genre: 1920s, Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Heavy Petting, Intercrural Sex, Post-Canon, internalized ableism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-15
Updated: 2013-11-15
Packaged: 2018-01-01 14:32:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,384
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1045065
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Island_of_Reil/pseuds/Island_of_Reil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Rat is in love with Antonija, the American-born daughter of the Samavian scholar who tutored her alongside the Rat and Marco. Antonija wants to spend her life with the Rat. But she also wants to follow in her father’s footsteps, and she is leaving Samavia to study abroad. The Rat fears he may lose her someday to a man who can stand up straight and walk without crutches. Even more than that, he fears she might die trying to bear any child he could give her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lover and Scholar

As the waiter made his way across the terrace, the Rat turned in the café chair and called out, “ _Konobar!_ ” Once he’d caught the waiter’s eye, he raised two fingers and added, “ _Dve kafe, molim vas._ ” The young man inclined his smooth dark head in acknowledgment and continued into the building toward the kitchen.

The Rat’s companion displayed white teeth in a broad smile. He raised his brows at her.

“You’ve been here eight years and your accent is still atrocious,” said Antonija Anđelovića. Her own Samavian was flawless, but she had spoken in English — to the Rat’s ears, a thoroughly barbarous form of English, rough and nasal, with drawn-out vowels and bitten-off consonants.

He scowled at her, only half-mockingly but hoping it came across completely so. His was a mind made for strategy, for logic, for mathematics — but not for foreign tongues. He seldom cared; he was understood well enough. But he cared what she thought of him.

“And you speak English like a bloody colonial.”

“Well, I _am_ a ‘bloody colonial,’” Antonija retorted, affecting an English accent and mimicking the patrician sneer that affront sometimes brought out in the Rat. “Amazing thing, the British Empire. A boy from the streets of London speaks as though a revolution that happened a century and a half ago deprived him personally of a manor house in Westchester.” He didn’t take offence this time. Her upbringing had been better than his — most people’s were — but not exactly illustrious, either. 

Bratislav Anđelović had fled Samavia as a young man and eventually settled in New York City, where he first studied, then taught, history at the College of the City. He married one of his students, whose dirt-poor Calabrian parents were glad enough someone was taking their bookish daughter off their hands to overlook that he was Orthodox, not Catholic. They hadn’t considered that their future granddaughter might not be raised with much religion at all. One of many reasons the Rat liked her.

Antonia — for in America she’d spelt her name in the English and Italian way — was, like the Rat, an only child. Her mother could not give her little girl any siblings, and her third attempt finally killed her. Heartbroken, Professor Anđelović returned to Samavia after the restoration of the Fedorović with his adolescent daughter in tow, not only out of patriotism but to escape the ghosts that had come to haunt New York for him.

Samavia was short on educators after the War of Restoration. Anđelović sought out King Ivor, once called Stefan Loristan, and boldly offered his services as tutor to the young Prince Ivor, still called Marco by his intimates. Stefan readily accepted, and he insisted the Rat be schooled alongside Marco. Antonija joined them as well, even when her father taught at odd hours so that the two young men could take up arms when their country needed them.

Another tutor was hired for sciences, maths, and logic, but Anđelović taught Marco, the Rat, and Antonija everything else. In his spare time, and financed by the Crown, he continued his studies at the University of Melzarr that he might be all the better a tutor. By the time his three young charges were done with him, he had become one of Samavia’s most distinguished scholars.

The waiter returned promptly — not very Samavian of him, the Rat thought wryly, but there were advantages to being the Prince’s _aide-de-camp_ — and set down two white demitasses before them. The contents steamed into the still, hot August air, making it ripple over the table. “ _Hvala,_ ” the Rat said; the waiter inclined his head once more. Antonija’s lips quirked behind her cup but she said nothing.

The Rat raised his own cup and sipped. Other Easterners put sugar in their coffee, but Samavians drank theirs just as the Turks did: thick, black, and bitter. He must have consumed gallons of it that way during the Great War; he and his men had been lucky to have had coffee at all. In peace-time he had reverted to taking it sweet, but he wasn’t about to give Antonija more ammunition by asking the waiter for sugar.

“Quite good,” he said, speaking truthfully.

“It is,” she replied. “Then again this coffee-house has been here more than two hundred years, so I’m sure they know their business by now.”

A companionable silence unspun between them as they continued to sip. Antonija, with almond-shaped eyes that were a luminous black, watched the continuous stream of passers-by on the pavement only a few feet away.

The Rat watched Antonija. She had pinned up the dark mass of her hair, leaving just a few wisps to curl in the heat above the long, graceful sweep of her exposed neck. Her face gave little away to those who didn’t know her, but he was familiar with her expression: reluctance to broach a certain subject, tinged with melancholy.

Finally, she turned to face him again.

“When do you leave for Padua?” he asked quietly.

“In two weeks.”

“You must be excited,” the Rat said, his tone neutral.

At that, she smiled. “Actually, I am. My father has a few colleagues there who said they’d be happy to mentor me and watch out for me. And a friend of mine from Brooklyn will be studying there, too.”

“I’m sure he’ll be glad to see you.”

Antonija smirked. “I’m sure _she_ will. Jealous, are you?”

“Of course I am,” he said without missing a beat.

Her expression became serious again. “It’s not forever, you know.”

“Four years might as well be forever,” he said bitterly. “Why can’t you study at the university here?”

“We’ve been through this before, Jem,” she said wearily. “Melzarr isn’t half the university Padua is, especially not for history. Political history in particular.” Her voice turned cajoling. “And, like I’ve told you, it won’t be for four years straight. I’ll spend a term or two at Melzarr; their courses in Balkan and Samavian history are a bit more comprehensive. Not to mention that I’ll be back every Christmas and every summer. Maybe Easters as well. And I see no reason the boy who crossed Europe on crutches couldn’t hop a train and visit me every once in a while.” A soft smile. “Venice isn’t far from Padua. Don’t tell me you wouldn’t like to ride in a gondola with me.”

He wasn’t in a mood to be cajoled. “While you’re in Padua, you could meet a professor, or another student, and fall in love with him.” It came out more peevishly than he’d intended. He was glad he hadn’t said _a professor or another student with strong legs and a straight back_.

Her eyes narrowed. “And while I’m in Padua, _you_ could meet another Samavian girl and fall in love with _her_. Nothing’s certain in this life, and both of us should know that. If you’d asked me eight years ago I’d have guessed I’d be studying at the College of the City like Papa did. Columbia at best.”

The Rat didn’t reply immediately. She was right. As she usually was in such things. His choice, such as it was, was to see her leave for Padua and hope she’d come back to him for good one day, or convince her to stay and watch her potential wither. And her resentment of him grow.

Perhaps it would be better for her if he _did_ meet and fall in love with another woman.

He sipped at his coffee again, then changed the subject. “Do you miss New York?”

She looked slightly surprised. “I do. And I don’t. I wish I could see my mother’s family and my friends there again. I miss the Public Library, and the library at the College. Kids weren’t supposed to be allowed into the College library but Papa took me there anyway. I miss some of the sights. But there aren’t many Samavians there — most of the expatriate community is in Chicago — and Italians are considered the scum of the earth.” Her lower lip curled.

“I’m not sure Padua will be much better for a half-Calabrian,” he said, not unsympathetically.

She shrugged. “It can’t be worse. I’m sure I’ll hear snide remarks about my accent. Probably more of them about being a woman at university. My father’s name will help a little, even if I’ll have his reputation to live up to. Do you miss London?”

“Less than you miss New York, I daresay. But I do, some days. Like today. Wouldn’t mind a chill rain just now.”

“New York is worse than Melzarr in the summer,” she said. “Hotter, more humid, and _stinking._ ” The last word she said with a hiss of disgust. Then, abruptly, she smiled. “Maybe we should honeymoon in London someday? Somewhere a little nicer than where you lived?”

He stared at her for a moment, then raised his brows again and spoke with feigned shock. “I’ve not even _asked_ you yet, you brazen creature — and you’re leaving me in a fortnight to boot!”

“‘Yet,’” she repeated with a broad, feline grin of triumph. “And I’m not ‘leaving’ you. I thought you were a soldier, not a melodramatist.”

“I’m sure you’ll expect me to get down on one knee before you, too.”

Her eyes widened. “Of _course_ I don’t! Prostrating yourself before me would work just as well.”

He laughed uproariously at that. When he opened his eyes again, he saw that the smug grin had softened into an affectionate smile, and he covered her hand with his.

They sat a while longer and spoke of other things. Mainly, Marco’s wedding that June to a daring young woman who had disguised herself as a man, joined the battalion that the Rat led in the Great War, and was the linch-pin of two hard-won victories. After her secret came out, Stefan awarded her the Medal of Courage — and, despite her sex, a baroncy, that the nobility would more readily accept this brash common-born creature with whom the Prince had fallen in love. The Rat had been, was _still_ , gobsmacked, that Marco — who for all his many virtues often could not see what was right before his nose — had learned her secret long before he himself did. Antonija found that fact hilarious.

The conversation shifted to Stefan’s courtship of a widowed duchess who was of an age with him; then to his old soldier-manservant Lazarus, who had died the previous year and whom they all missed terribly. They spoke of Samavia’s relations with the Jiardasians, the Beltrazans, the Soviets. The Great War. The War of Restoration. The history of the street they were in. Antonija’s knowledge of Samavian history wasn’t quite as encyclopaedic as her father’s, but she could rattle off the most arcane facts at the drop of a hat — and the Rat could listen to her do so for hours.

At length he pulled out his bill-fold, tossed a handful of coins onto the glass top of the little table, took up his crutches, and rose. Antonija followed him out of the terrace onto the pavement, one hand on his elbow as they made their way down the street. With her other hand she pointed at this building and that, still speaking of all the history they had witnessed. They strolled southwest, toward the Royal Palace, blinking against the setting sun.

Shortly they came abreast of the entry to a narrow alley. The Rat recalled that along one of its ancient walls was a recess just deep enough to conceal two people. Abruptly, he turned left into the alley. He could not pull Antonija along with him while remaining upright on his crutches, but she followed him into the alley without question.

The recess, a few yards ahead, was now deep in evening’s shadows. The Rat moved into it as far as he could, then turned round and leant against one side.

“Antonija,” he said, almost pleadingly.

She came up to him — she was nearly of a height with him — and slid her arms round his neck. His own arms encircled her waist, and she lifted her head to brush her lips against his. Her perfume was of sweet flowers and bitter oranges, with a dark whisper of moss and musk beneath. But her mouth tasted of coffee. Judging by the face she pulled, so did his. Both of them chuckled before beginning the kiss anew.

Before long he was pulling her tightly against him, not caring that she could feel him growing hard, and she had a hand on either side of his head and was caressing everywhere inside his mouth with her insistent tongue. When they finally broke apart for air, they were both panting.

“My father…” she finally whispered, “…is in Berlin until next week, attending a symposium.”

He stared at her a moment, a bit too giddy with desire to realise what she was telling him. Then he swallowed.

“Of course,” she said, worry creasing her brow slightly, “we have to be careful. I don’t want your children just _yet_ , Jem.”

He could have teased her by echoing the _yet_ , as she had done to him, but her words struck a chord of anguish in him. Rather than spoil the mood, he said quietly but emphatically, “I will do nothing to put you in such danger.”

They straightened their clothes and smoothed their hair before they re-emerged from the recess, then the alley. The remainder of their walk was brisk, quiet, purposeful.

Bratislav Anđelović and his daughter lived in a flat two floors up from the street, not far from the palace. Between his former status as a royal tutor and his current one in academia, Anđelović could have had a luxurious suite at the palace for the asking. He preferred living in a quiet row of old buildings with a shabby charm to them; rather like the one he’d grown up in, he liked to say. But, more than once, he had also said privately to the Rat and Antonija, “The politics of academe are quite enough for me, thank you. I’ve no desire to be immersed in those of court as well.”

Antonija ascended the narrow interior stair nimbly, the Rat following her almost as swiftly on his crutches. She was slender, but she had a rounded bottom, and it moved back and forth almost hypnotically under her knee-length skirt as she climbed. He wished he could reach out and stroke it now, not have to wait till—

She stood at the top of the stairs and unlocked the door, then walked in, the Rat trailing her. It was a modestly sized flat, crammed with books and papers and photographs and various bits of art. Its warm still air was redolent of mildewing paper and pipe-tobacco, of this morning’s coffee and yesterday’s cooking.

A large grey tabby was draped over the back of the sofa; he blinked in acknowledgment but did not move. “Hello, Prgav,” Antonija said quietly, scratching the cat’s head and ears. Prgav flicked his left ear forward and made a soft _mrrr_ of greeting. He had mellowed somewhat with age, but the Rat, having been gouged and nipped more than once by this beast named for his irritable temperament, kept his distance.

When Antonija looked up again at him, he found his breath to be surprisingly short.

“Your bedroom?” he managed to get out.

“No,” she said. “My bed’s too narrow. My father’s bedroom. It’s on the north side of the building, so it’ll be cooler, too.” When he stared at her in disbelief, she grinned. “Sheets can be changed and washed, you know.”

“I truly hope he doesn’t come home early from Berlin.”

“It wouldn’t be much better if he were to catch us in _my_ bedroom,” she pointed out sensibly. “But, either way, he’d be civilised about it. He wouldn’t take out a pistol and shoot you for deflowering me; he’d just inform you that if you got me pregnant and didn’t marry me, _then_ he’d kill you.”

“How comforting,” the Rat muttered.

“Oh, I’m sure Marco would personally march you to the altar with his own pistol at the back of your head before it came to _that,_ ” she said airily, leading him into the larger of the flat’s two bedrooms.

He guided his crutches gingerly round the stacks of books and papers on the dusty bare floor. This room was indeed cooler than the living room. Through the open window and the filmy curtain over it came a faint evening breeze, along with the diminishing daylight. There were more books and papers on the night-table, as well as on the desk beneath the window and in the small book-case in the far corner. Photographs, none of them of family, and maps adorned the walls. The Rat’s usual behaviour upon entering a room full of books was to browse them, but this evening there was competition for his attention. The bed, happily, was free of reading material.

Antonija turned down the dark-brown coverlet and sat on the edge of the mattress, nerves and desire chasing one another across her fine-boned face. The Rat longed to put her at her ease, but he was sure his expression was the same as hers.

He had been with only two other women before. One had been a camp follower, and he hadn’t been entirely sober at the time. The other had been the daughter of a duke with Iarović kin, ten years his elder and animated by spite. Her keen mind for political machinations was what had initially drawn him to her, but her talents, whether in bed or at court, had ultimately not been worth the risks her ambition and lack of conscience posed to him. Or to Marco, for that matter.

There had been a few men as well, in the trenches and in the forests — the rough, desperate grapplings of soldiers seeking to dull the edge of mortal fear as well as that of lust. One of those men had been Marco, and the experience not merely one of relief. No-one else knew, and they had never spoken of it between them again. In any case, the Rat doubted that any such experiences would be of use to him just now.

As Antonija kicked off her pumps, he sat beside her and propped his crutches against the headboard. He lifted each of his legs with his hands to untie his shoes and pull off his stockings, all of which he let drop to the floor. For a brief moment he studied her expression. Then he lifted the hem of his light summer shirt, pulled it over his head and the rounded knoll of his back, and let it fall to the floor as well.

She raised her fingers to his face, tracing his razor-sharp features, the lines set prematurely into his flesh, the thin narrow slash of his lips, as if to memorise all of it. He mouthed one fingertip and sucked it gently into his mouth, making her catch her breath, then took her hand in both of his and pressed his lips into her palm. She made a soft sound, a kind of keening hum, and brought her mouth to his again.

A man whose legs worked could have borne her downward upon the bed, but the Rat could not. Antonija, seeming to read his thoughts, swung her own legs up and slid backward, giving him room to haul up his lower body by the strength of his arms. He lay on his side and pulled her closer. During a series of kisses that proceeded from the merest brushing of lips to wet and deep and intimate, then back again, he deftly eased the pins out of her hair. He turned and sat up to lay them on the night-table. Then he lay down again facing her and wove his fingers into the soft glossy blackness, shaking it out till it tumbled round her shoulders. Had she been standing it would have fallen to her shoulder-blades.

Gently he pushed all of it back to bare the golden skin of her neck, which he swept his mouth against lightly, over and over, touching every bare spot he could find. The room seemed to fill with the soft wet sounds of his lips and tongue, overlaying her ragged breathing. She hooked her stockinged ankle over and round his hips, and he slid a hand under her skirt and slip, stroking the smooth expanse of thigh above her garter, reaching upward to cup her buttock through her knickers.

Soft murmurs and moans escaped her. She was raking her fingernails through the thick shock of his hair and against his scalp, creating little trails of sensation that sparks elsewhere in his body answered. Then her mouth was at his ear, sucking in the lobe, licking her way round the outer edge. He gasped, loudly, and when he released the breath it came out in a faint, almost astonished moan.

He slid down against her body and lay his head against the upper curve of one breast, working at the buttons of her blouse and hoping he didn’t send any of them pinging across the room. He tried not to exhale with obvious relief when the fourth came undone with no apparent damage. Her brassière, not much more than a band of silk with shoulder-straps, was easy to push aside, and then he had a small breast cupped in one hand and its short dark nipple hardening between his lips.

She groaned and pushed herself against him, one hand in his hair and the other stroking his shoulder and the hunch of his back. Her leg was still round him, her toes caressing his buttocks through her stocking. He turned his head to suck at the other nipple, raising his eyes to watch her screw her eyes shut and bare her teeth. His trousers were already uncomfortably tight and becoming even more so as she ground her hips against his chest and made soft mewling noises against the crown of his head. He didn’t want to undo them, not just yet, till—

He let his hand slip downward, past the last fastened button over her belly, down the front of her skirt, under the hem. As it glided upward again he let his fingertips brush against her inner thigh, but this time he didn’t stop there. Slowly he flattened his palm against the centre panel of her knickers, feeling moist heat through the silk. She pushed downward against it, and he let her for a bit, before easing his hand backward to let his fingertips seek out contour. He could feel his own blood surge and swell in him, feel the trip-hammer of her heart against his cheek, as he traced the outer lips through the dampening silk. When they had begun to engorge as if to meet his touch, he slipped his fingertips under the fabric and sank them into coarse short curls and hot slick wetness.

Antonija’s every other breath was a gasp now. As he stroked her intimately he continued mouthing her nipples, lightly scraping his teeth against the tips, listening to how she pitched her moans and gauging how vigorously she rocked against his hand. He was waiting for a certain moment; trying to ascertain it, he found, was good for diverting his attention from his own need. Though he wasn’t entirely sure the moment was upon her yet, it seemed close enough. He moved a fingertip upward and found the tiny, hard protuberance he was seeking.

She let out a sharp cry. He pressed down ever so slightly, and she returned the pressure with much more force. The next time he pressed harder and let the tip of his finger slide over her a bit, and she gasped, “Oh, _yes,_ Jem, like that,” and a rhythm was borne of it, a dance between her hips and his hand, its tempo increasing with every step. When he felt the tension in her muscles crest, he lifted his head to watch her face once more: eyes closed, cheeks scarlet, bitten lips parted; golden-fleshed breasts, their stiff nipples wet with his saliva, heaving against his nose and chin as she came undone from almost nothing more than the tip of his finger.

It was, he thought, the most beautiful sight he had ever seen.

She sagged against him, still trembling a little. “Oh, love,” he said hoarsely against her breast-bone. A painful throb made him realise he had to free himself and soon, but then she reached down and swept her hand between his clothed legs, and he wasn’t sure whether he groaned more with discomfort or pleasure.

She lodged her head in the crook of his neck to watch her own hands undo the buttons of his trousers. Then she reached in, and when her soft fingers encircled him he moaned again, this time wantonly and with an edge of desperation.

“How close are you?” she murmured against his ear, punctuating the question by chewing gently on the lobe.

“Close enough,” he gasped.

She released him so that she could roll her skirt up to her waist with both hands. Then she slid the hand that had not been caressing him into her knickers and undulated slightly. When it emerged, her fingers glistened in the last of the light through the curtain. She worked him out of his trousers with the first hand, and then both were upon him, smoothing her own slipperiness over him. He had to grit his teeth to last against both the sensation and the thought of her touching herself, then touching him.

She pulled herself up close to him again and braced herself with one arm round his shoulder and hunch. With the other she guided him to lie against one inner thigh, a few inches below her knickers, then clamped both thighs tightly together, making a vise of smooth warm skin and slick fluid on either side of him.

“Oh, God,” he choked out before her mouth pressed against his and she began to draw her still-damp fingernails lightly up and down one side of his neck in shiver-making circles. He was unable to stop his hips from moving now, unable not to think about where he was rubbing against her, unable not to think about what lay a few inches above and what it would feel like to plunge into, to be surrounded entirely by her, to be one with her—

He didn’t, couldn’t, last. With a string of broken whimpers against her lips he began to spasm, thrusting sharp and short as he spurted against her thighs and dampened the top-sheet beneath them. All the breath left him as he sank down into the mattress, and he pulled her half-atop him and kissed her roughly and fervently.

For several minutes afterward she remained sprawled over him, and they idly stroked one another’s sweat-sheened skin without speaking. At length, she said, “I think we need a towel.” He loosed his arms from round her. She rose, then pulled her brassière back down over her breasts, leaving her skirt still hiked up and her blouse unbuttoned. He watched her move to the door, supple as a willow yet ripe as an apple, her hair a witch’s nest of dark tangles. 

She disappeared briefly, then returned wiping her hands on a limp and threadbare towel. She passed it over the backs of her thighs before handing it to him. He swabbed at himself and then, less effectually, at the sheet. She pushed lightly at his wrist and said, “It’s fine, honey, I’ve got to take a basket to the laundress in the morning anyway.”

He shrugged and laid the towel atop the night-table before tucking himself back into his trousers. Then they nestled together, not speaking for a while longer, watching the light of the gas-lamp outside the window replace that of the setting sun, listening to the odd call or whistle from the street below.

With little to distract him, worry began to gnaw at the Rat again. As little as he wanted to mar the peace of the moment, he would have the matter out between them while she was still here. While she was still young.

He took a deep breath and, finally, began with, “You said, before we got here, that you don’t want my children, ‘just yet.’“

“It’s not easy to study with little ones underfoot,” she pointed out.

“I know, and I wouldn’t ask it of you. That’s… not what worries me.”

They were silent for another brief while, and then Antonija said slowly, “I think I know what you’re worried about.”

“Do you?”

Rather than answer him directly, she said, “I spoke to Dr Šujica” — their other tutor, a biologist by training — “and asked him if he’d pass along an inquiry to one of his colleagues at the medical school. Which he did.”

The Rat felt cold suddenly, despite the mild evening air. 

When she continued, her voice was flat, detached. “He said that if he understood his colleague correctly, a child may be born with a hunched back — the medical term is _kyphosis_ , he said — and neuromuscular dysfunction of the legs for a variety of reasons. Malnutrition during pregnancy, for example. Or a botched delivery.”

The Rat’s heart began to pound. He said, his own voice as toneless as hers, “But he didn’t rule out heredity.” A pause. “Did he?”

She was silent for another beat, and then she said, “No. He didn’t.”

His arm tightened round her. “I can’t… inflict that on a child. Or on you.”

At that she lifted her shoulders from the bed and his arm, and she glared at him. “You wouldn’t be ‘inflicting’ anything on me. I’ve made my choice. I know the risks.”

“Your mother died in child-bed,” he said, anger and fear sharpening his tone. “You’ve said you take after her in build. What will happen to you if you cannot… pass an infant with a hunch in its back?”

“Caesarean,” she said curtly.

His voice rose. “So, you’d be butchered, only to die of infection and leave the baby motherless?” He bit his tongue before he could add, _and me alone?_

She expelled a harsh breath. “It’s much safer than it used to be. And lower your voice, please.”

He seethed but obeyed, saying tightly, “Assuming you survived, that would still leave us with a crippled child.”

“ _If_ the child was crippled in the first place. Which you don’t know, I don’t know, and the doctor at the medical school doesn’t know. Nobody knows.”

He sighed and began to pass his hand over his face, then left it there over his eyes. After a moment she said, “You didn’t know anyone on either side of your family other than your parents, did you?”

“No,” he said dejectedly.

“Could you make inquiries from Melzarr? Have someone in London make them on your behalf?”

He snorted. “Oh, I’m sure they’d all want to hear from me.”

“Why not?” she demanded, indignant now on his behalf. “You never did them any wrong, and you’re a god-damned war hero now.”

“ _Because,_ Antonija, I’d remind them of my father. He disgraced his own family, and he cost my mother’s family a daughter and a sister. Nothing I could do could supersede that. And do you _really_ think any of them would be eager to tell a stranger how many cripples they’ve got squirrelled away in garrets and institutions?” He ended the question on a slightly shaky note, and he turned his head away sharply.

She said nothing, just settled back down beside him and lay her head and palm on his chest. Eventually his eyes stopped pricking and his breath ceased to catch in his throat. He turned back to her and put his arm round her once more. The quiet stretched between them again, broken only by a loud voice singing drunkenly in the street below and a second loud voice threatening a beating if the first didn’t cease immediately. Antonija’s lips twitched, but the Rat didn’t have it in him to be amused just now.

After a while, she said quietly, “ _If_ I give birth to a child with... the same conditions as you, we will take care of it, and we will love it as we would any other child.”

The Rat said nothing. He wanted to tell her she had no idea what she spoke of. He wanted to tell her to go find herself a man who was whole. He suspected she would have punched him in the face for it and never spoken to him again. He could bear the former but was unsure he could bear the latter.

“Jem.” Her voice was emphatic now, her consonants unusually crisp. “Your father had a straight back and working legs, and from everything you’ve told me about him he was a completely worthless son of a bitch. You’re _ten_ times the man he was. And you came up from the streets with nothing. _Nothing,_ Jem.”

Her voice softened. “But your children will have a brave, brilliant _aide-de-camp_ for a father. And a healthy, well-fed, well-educated mother. And a Prince for an honourary uncle. And, may he live long enough to see them, a doting grandfather.”

He was quiet a moment longer, and then he said, almost inaudibly, “I don’t deserve you.”

With an explosive half-shout of exasperation she grabbed the soiled towel from the night-table and whipped it across the side of his head before he could duck it. “Oh, knock it _off,_ would you, with the self-pity? One of these days I’m gonna push you down the stairs, I swear.” He smiled weakly and rubbed at his head. “So I got you to smile again. Good. Stay that way.” She threw the towel back onto the table and pushed herself off the bed again. Once standing, she tugged her skirt back down over her hips.

“Where are you going?”

“Call of nature.” She swayed back toward the door and disappeared through it once more, shutting it behind her this time. He listened to her foot-steps echo through the flat, then stop. There were a few minutes of silence, then the faint splash of water in a basin. Her foot-falls resumed, and he heard the distinct clink of glass on glass. 

When she walked back into the bedroom, she held a bottle in one hand and dangled two empty wine-glasses from the other. It was too dark now to see the bottle’s label or contents.

“What’s that, love?”

“ _Calabrese. Cirò rosso,_ to be precise.” As with Samavian, she spoke Italian with barely any American accent. “My _nonno_ and my uncle Francesco used to give me little sips of it. Poor fellas can’t get it anymore, not even from the bootleggers. Wish I could send ‘em a few bottles.”

She placed both glasses on the night-table, uncorked the bottle, and filled them. The Rat sat up and took one. “ _Salve,_ ” she said, lifting the other and touching it to his.

“Cheers,” he replied. Wine wasn’t his drink of choice, but he wasn’t going to insult her by refusing it. In a few gulps he tossed the entire glass back. The vintage was strong and sharp, tasting of cherries and oak. At least it wasn’t _šljivovica_ or, worse, _rakia_. In any event the taste was less important than the effect it would have on him. Which it began to, in short order.

“Better?” she asked softly.

“Much,” he replied, setting the glass back on the night-table. She’d already done so with hers, which was still about half-full.

Still on her feet, she undid the last button on her blouse and shrugged out of it. Then she shed her skirt, slip, stockings, and garters, letting them fall to the floor alongside the rest of the clothes and shoes on the floor. Clad only in brassière and knickers, she climbed back into bed next to him.

“I… wasn’t going to stay,” he began.

“Well, you are _now._ ” Her tone brooked no objections. “You just had a glass of strong wine, and it’s dark out. I wouldn’t let you walk back to the palace on two good legs, let alone crutches. Or down the stairs for that matter.”

“I didn’t have _that_ much to drink,” he scoffed.

“Then have some more. It’ll help you sleep. You could use it.”

He scowled at her again. “You’ll be the death of me. First you beat me with a spunk-rag, _then_ you all but pour alcohol down my throat.” He refilled his glass and drained as much as he could in one go, which was nearly all of it. His hand was a little less steady now as he re-placed the glass on the night-table, and he inadvertently clinked it against hers.

“Mmph. Poured it down your throat _and_ pinched your nose shut. Pass mine to me, please.”

He obeyed, and she made short work of the wine that remained. As he put her glass back onto the night-table for her, she shoved the one pillow on the bed, long enough for two sleepers, into place where his head had just been. After he’d lain down again and put his head upon it, she turned about, nestled her back and bottom into his chest and hips spoon-style, and pulled his arm back round her. 

Within a minute or two her body began to feel lax and boneless against his, and her breathing gradually slowed and evened out. He’d learnt to sleep in all sorts of odd places, from a filthy rag-pile to a hillside glen in broad daylight to a trench full of corpses. He’d never before met anyone who could fall asleep more easily than he could, not even another soldier.

The Rat lay awake for a few minutes longer than Antonija did, feeling the wine smooth away the tension in his body like a warm iron over a cold bed-sheet. He tended not to remember his dreams very well, but in the bright hot morning he would vaguely recall mediaeval domes and turrets, canals flowing quietly under ancient arched bridges, the pleasantly bitter scents of oranges and oak-moss, and the mingled flavours of red wine and black coffee.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [Sineala](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Sineala/) for looking this over.
> 
> While this fic imagines the Rat, and Marco, differently than do the other post-canon _Lost Prince_ stories I've written, my headcanon remains that the events of the novel took place in 1912 and that ["Samavia"](http://redorcsblog.blogspot.ie/2010/12/fictional-central-eastern-europe.html) is actually [Serbia from Belgrade ("Melzarr") southward](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/76/Serbia_Map.png). The Rat's words in the very first paragraph translate to "Waiter! Two coffees, please." _Hvala_ means "Thank you." And _prgav_ means "grumpy." (Yes. Grumpy Cat.)
> 
> From 1866 until 1929, the first college in New York City's public university system was called [the College of the City](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/College_of_the_City_of_New_York_%28disambiguation%29). It is currently known as the City College of the City University of New York (CUNY). ("College of the City" was also the name of New York University's undergraduate college back when the university was called "University of the City of New York.")
> 
> I spent far too long researching a perfume for Antonija. I settled on [Chypre de Coty](http://boisdejasmin.com/2008/04/musings-on-chyp.html).
> 
> While [congenital kyphosis](http://www.seattlechildrens.org/medical-conditions/bone-joint-muscle-conditions/spinal-conditions-treatment/scoliosis/kyphosis/) with resultant spinal-cord compression could have left the Rat unable to walk as well as hunchbacked, it also would have robbed him of sexual function. As Burnett did not explicitly say he was paralyzed — and, indeed, I doubt he'd have been able to use crutches if he had been — neither have I tried to specify the precise medical issue with his legs.
> 
> Other than genetics, kyphosis in newborns [has no definite cause](http://www.nhs.uk/Conditions/Kyphosis/Pages/Causes.aspx). It may have been reasonable for a physician of nearly a century ago to wonder if malnourishment in the mother or problems in delivery might have caused it.
> 
> Antonija is correct that [Caesarean sections were much safer than they had been](http://www.laboratoriosilesia.com/upfiles/sibi/GI1007846.pdf), which was thanks to a better idea of where to cut, better sanitary practices, and maternal anesthesia.
> 
> Finally, [here is a page](http://www.decanter.com/wine/reports/529890/unchartered-italy-ciro-doc-calabria) about wines from Cirò, most of which are red.


End file.
